Congressional candidates — from the long-time incumbents who seem entrenched in office to the long-shot challengers seeking to replace them — have been strategizing for months, sometimes years. They’ve been raising money, courting grassroots activists, lining up consultants, and figuring out the most promising pockets of support.
Now, with just 11 months until Florida’s August 2026 primaries and less than 14 months until the November midterm election, there’s sudden uncertainty.
The state’s congressional candidates don’t know the contours of the districts in which they’ll be running.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has said repeatedly in recent weeks that he wants Republicans who control Florida government to change the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts. The push comes as Republicans across the country seek to comply with President Donald Trump’s call for changing districts in a way that gets more Republicans, and fewer Democrats elected to Congress.
U.S. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Broward-Palm Beach County Democrat, said on a recent politics podcast that the national Republican effort to change districts before the 2026 election could result in a major change in the state: “two or three in Florida.”
That would be a remarkable shift. The state, which independent analysts have found is already gerrymandered to favor Republicans, already has 20 Republican members of Congress and eight Democrats.
Daniel Smith, a University of Florida political scientist and nationally recognized redistricting expert, said last month the state is already so gerrymandered it could be “tough to squeeze out another Republican seat, much less two.”
Harder to campaign
If the effort proceeds, communities would wind up in different districts, with voters having to choose among candidates they may never have encountered before — and candidates vying for support in new places.
“It’s tough to run a campaign when you don’t even know what your district will look like or who you should be talking to. Campaigns are about building coalitions, and reaching people where they are. But we can’t build coalitions when we don’t know who the voters will be,” said Elijah Manley.
He already is attempting something that often doesn’t succeed: defeating an incumbent in a primary. Manley is challenging U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick in the Democratic primary in what is — for now, at least — the Broward-Palm Beach county 20th Congressional District.
“Our campaign has been reaching out to voters across the district early, because we believe that the early bird gets the worm. That’s how underdog candidates like me get elected,” Manley said via text. “It’s also very difficult to raise the money and spend it effectively, when we don’t know if we’ll have a district to run in. As a result, there is uncertainty from donors. That has had a real impact on our campaign.”
Kevin Wagner, a Florida Atlantic University political scientist, said the uncertainty is undoubtedly having some effect on “the level of detailed planning that many campaigns do pretty far out,” though the extent isn’t clear.
“One of the things that campaign managers do is they size up a district. They have different measures of the voters, the turnout of the voters, all of the things that affect (results). It’s hard to imagine how you do those things if you’re not certain about what the district is going to look like,” he said.
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Dealing with uncertainty
Others said that while not knowing where a candidate will be running isn’t ideal, it hasn’t by any means paralyzed campaigns.
J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the nonpartisan newsletter on campaigns and elections from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said it makes sense for incumbents to run as if they’re going to have the districts they represent now.
Campaigns continue to operate, said Eric Johnson, who has been a Democratic strategist for federal, state and local candidates — including congressional candidates in previous redistrictings.
“How do they run? The truth is they run exactly as they should be. They run as hard as they can in the district they are in now. It is impossible to predict what the districts will look like, what (they might) change to, and quite frankly if they will change at all,” Johnson said.
“All we know is the governor would like to change the districts. We don’t know what passes. We don’t know what the courts will do. So good candidates are doing what they should be doing: They run hard where they are,” he said. “And then if things shift, that’s when they make the shift.”
In the redistricting that preceded the 2012 election, the new map added more Democrats to Republican U.S. Rep. Allen West’s Broward-Palm Beach county district. So he moved to a newly created district in northern Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties, hoping the territory would be more friendly.
Democrat Patrick Murphy also moved to the new district — and ended up defeating West. Johnson was Murphy’s strategist.
Top target
The 23rd District, where Moskowitz is seeking a third term, is the most competitive of Florida’s 28 congressional districts. The partisan voting index from the Cook Political Report rates the district as D plus 2, which means it performed 2 points more Democratic than the nation during the past two presidential contests.
“I’m absolutely going to get targeted. My district’s the closest in the state,” he said on an episode of “The Chuck Toddcast” podcast, which dropped earlier this month. The most likely scenario from the mid-decade redistricting, Moskowitz said, is getting more Republican voters in the Palm Beach County part of the district and fewer Democratic voters in Broward.
Moskowitz has done better in his previous elections than other Democrats on the ballot in the same area, but if Florida Republicans find a way to make the district much more Republican, 2026 becomes more difficult.
Podcast host Chuck Todd, who used to host the NBC program “Meet The Press,” wondered if it might prompt Moskowitz to run instead for U.S. Senate next year.
“I’m not looking at it. I’m looking at re-election, but if for some reason Republicans decide to do all the gerrymandering and decide to set me free from my district, perhaps then I would look at it,” Moskowitz said. “So I’m not looking at it.”
Later, he said, “I actually hope that I’m running for reelection.”
Coleman said he “could see them making the Moskowitz seat a little redder,” but called him a “pretty strong incumbent.”
Republican Joe Kaufman said the redistricting uncertainty isn’t affecting him.
He was the unsuccessful 2024 Republican nominee against Moskowitz, and is one of several people seeking the 2026 nomination to challenge the Democrat. Kaufman, who has run for office several times previously, said the current district is winnable.
“I don’t know how or if redistricting will take place in CD23. I do know the demographics have already shifted and the numbers are moving in my favor,” Kaufman said via text. “I’ve shown that Moskowitz is vulnerable by having the closest race in Florida in 2024. I am now raising significant money that will allow me to reach the voters with my message of working tirelessly for our district, and our grassroots support is growing by the day. Moskowitz is right to be concerned. If redistricting does happen it would likely be to our benefit, and he will be in even bigger trouble. Either way I look forward to serving the district soon as congressman.”
Fundraising
Coleman said in a recent interview that incumbents might use the threat posed by redistricting uncertainty to encourage more support by sending out fundraising texts or emails warning that “the Republicans might come after my seat … basically rush me a donation so we can fight back.”
Moskowitz’s campaign did just that in an email blast on Friday.
“Now, with FIVE MAGA opponents vying to flip my seat and Republicans threatening to redraw district maps in their favor, we can all but guarantee that the margins will be even closer this time around,” he wrote.
Many uncertainties.
Trump wants it. DeSantis has made his intentions clear.
Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez, a Republican who has allied himself with Trump, has set up a Select Committee on Congressional Redistricting to consider the issue for next year’s legislative session.
The House committee has eight Republicans and three Democrats. State Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman, a Palm Beach County Republican, said she hadn’t yet received any information about the committee’s mandate.
One of the biggest unknowns is the Florida Senate. Senate President Ben Albritton has not said how he’d handle the issue and whether he thinks a mid-decade redistricting is necessary. As of Thursday, his spokeswoman said via email that has not changed.
There’s another force that could work against efforts to change the districts: The state’s current Republican members of Congress.
Changing the boundaries of districts could mean that some of them would have to introduce themselves to new pockets of voters, something that could make them more vulnerable. A midterm election is usually not good for members of the party that controls the White House, and Republican incumbents aren’t likely to embrace more uncertainty, FAU’s Wagner said.
“Existing members of Congress that are safe don’t like to make their districts less safe,” Wagner said, even if the people drawing the maps assure them they’ll be fine. “Even though they say ‘you’ll probably win,’ they don’t want to ‘probably win.’ They don’t want their districts cannibalized to help somebody else.”
A delegation’s incumbents usually get preferential treatment, Coleman said, adding they may not get the usual level of deference this time. “Basically the White House’s attitude seems to be we don’t care what the incumbents think,” he said, when the goal is to “draw a map where we win as many as we can.”
The office of U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, the Miami-Dade County Republican who is dean of the Florida Congressional Delegation, didn’t respond to requests for comment about redistricting.
His district could be affected if state map-makers in Tallahassee try to make re-election more difficult for U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Broward Democrat. Her 25th District shares a border with his 26th District.
Several other Republicans told the Florida Politics website last month that they weren’t enthusiastic about the prospect of changing district lines.
“I’d like to stick with what I got here,” U.S. Rep. Daniel Webster told Florida Politics. U.S. Rep. Aaron Bean said, “I’m happy to represent this district.” And U.S. Rep. Randy Fine questioned the legality of redistricting for partisan political reasons.
The uncertainty could last well into next year. The annual legislative session convenes in January and runs through March 13. Congressional candidates are supposed to qualify to get on the ballot in April. But when the Legislature has changed congressional district boundaries in the past, that deadline has sometimes been postponed until June.
Political writer Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.